Mainly I’m busy a) trying to find work that will allow me to pay the bills (I’m sure you’ve noticed the job market is particularly dire at the moment) and b) doing a full edit of The Novel.

That’s actually not so bad at the moment. Slow, but not too bad. It helps to have the entire manuscript in a single binder. (Thankfully, my print cartridge – which had been showing signs of gasping out its last bit of toner – found the will to live again, following a good shaking, and printed everything legibly.) And now that I know what needs to be added, thanks to i) an ongoing list I’ve been keeping and ii) the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook exercises, going through chapter-by-chapter means I’m tightening things rather than flailing.

At least I’m telling myself that.

Ideally, I’d like this version to end up as a sea of red ink, and then revise the entire ms on the computer, and do one more stylistic pass, and then…stop! Query time.

Thundercat, meanwhile, is on the windowsill, sleeping in the sun. There isn’t much sun these days (“summer” in Scotland is, well, rainy), so I am going to go for a walk and soak up some of it as well.